Syndicated columnist Marc Munroe Dion: Old and quiet and staying that way

Thirty years ago, I interviewed a former factory owner who was pushing 80. I was working for a midsize daily newspaper and the story was that, every few years, he'd give a party for his former employees. He rented a function room at a local restaurant, paid for a buffet and mingled with his former workers, reminiscing about the days before the Chinese put him out of his business.

"What the hell," he told me. "Some of these people worked for me a long time. I went to their weddings and when they baptized their kids."

It was a cute feature story.

He and I talked about the industry he'd been in, back when he'd employed maybe 200 people, and he said one thing that surprised me with its truth, because it was a cute feature story. I wasn't supposed to learn anything.

"If you're a boss, one of the facts you have to face is that you don't decide how much work gets done," he said. "Your workers do."

"You want people to be afraid to lose the job," he said, "but you don't want them to be scared to come to work."

I'm willing to bet that old man never wrote a "mission statement" in his life, and it was just as well, because a genuine corporate mission statement has no truck with the truth about how people work.

And now that old factory owner's spirit stalks the offices of America in a short-sleeved shirt with a pen in the pocket.

"I told you," he says, lighting a ghostly cigar as people "quiet quit."

"Quiet quitting" is the act of doing exactly what your job demands and nothing more. It is what union members call "work to rule," which is when a union tells its members not to do anything outside their job classification. It's done to remind a company that the workers are not lazy malcontents, and the work will slow down hugely if everyone quits doing "just a little extra" from time to time.

Apparently, the old "work to rule" concept has moved from union shops into the general working population, as nearly all union concepts do eventually. The eight-hour day. Not sending 9-year-old children down into coal mines.

The quiet quitting idea is terrifying stupid, unimaginative companies all across America because those companies thrive on saying things like "give 110%" and "make yourself indispensable." It's interesting to note that both those things are impossible, but they're expected of you.

One of the things I noticed in a 51-year career as an employee is that, if the manager quits, the office will run smoothly for at least a couple of weeks. If the janitor quits, the ladies room is out of toilet paper the next day.

I'm in favor of quiet quitting, and I don't understand why it's wrong to do the job for which you were hired instead of that job and half of another job. After all, we do the work, and if you want to speak in non-mission statement English, we decide how much work gets done. We always have, and we always will.

The American worker has been force-fed the concept of "you're lucky to have a job" since the Reagan years, when the people in the expensive shoes really started to step on labor's throat.

It's not "quiet quitting." It's a redistribution of power, and if we're lucky, it won't stop.

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